Thank you for sharing so many of your memories with me that night outside the theater. I saw a part of you my father could not have captured in a million notes or photos. It was something all our study would never have suspected—and it prepared me for what will come next. The way I’ll still remember how that night felt, even if I can’t remember why. Even if I don’t remember who you honestly are.

Again, I stopped, forced myself to look through the window to keep from continuing too quickly. Instead I felt the dryness in my throat, remembered his hand on the back of my neck.

I won’t write it down, only this and this you mustn’t share, not even with the Professor or Camille. I needed time, to keep the memory with me for a while, but now I’ll keep safe what makes you so exceptional so that no one can force you underground again, even to study. Everything else, I know you will keep.

The hand against the window was cold now. When it wiped the curtain of tears from my cheeks, the fingertips were bright red, the nail beds a lavender hue. In my other hand, the letter fanned the air so that I knew I was shaking.

I will buy a desk today, I would say to Ettie when she returned, pressing my eyelids shut so that a hot seal of tears was trapped there only to spill as soon as I opened them. I will buy a desk, and in the desk will be a drawer, with a key, and I will keep this letter there forever.

If I were a real girl, I might have been certain Harvey loved me because he’d said so. But I was not a real girl; the brown of my skin brightened in that moment but didn’t pale, and it was proof. This new epiphany would extend my life indefinitely like the ones that came before it.

He loved me. I knew for sure not because of the number of ways he’d tried to solve my predicament. I knew because he’d tried at all. Harvey Parrish was a scientist. What more provocative study could there be than how reprinting would change the famously conscious Mem—and he’d never shown the slightest curiosity.

Away from the window, I chose the alcove into which that desk would fit. I imagined how often I would sit there when the snow that had not come today finally swirled outside my window and there was not enough mink to keep me warm, when the next epiphany came and promised that I would someday be all alone.